Moto X might cost $299

Motorola’s first Made-in-America phone in years should launch in a matter of hours. The X-phone, or Moto X might even start shipping this week, which means we’re probably in for a quick global rollout.

The phone has been leaked on more than one occasion and we already know what to expect. There are a few unknowns though, and one is the price.

Goldman Sachs believes the phone will be priced at or around $300. That would put it in the same league with the 8GB Nexus 4, which is pretty good. However, the Moto X is not a flagship device like the Nexus 4.

There’s also a fresh tease from Motorola. The company shed more light on its X8 processor, which is a break from tradition. For years Motorola would not talk chips – it would just launch phones and provide some basic processor specs, without actually naming the processor vendor or exact type of processor.

The X8 is apparently a 28nm processor based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.7GHz. Motorola apparently customized the chip with two DSPs of its own and it tweaked the firmware. However, details remain sketchy and we still don’t know what to expect.

It appears that Motorola’s X8 logic, customized to meet its needs, could be applied to other chips as well, allowing Moto to come up with more custom chips using the same logic. A custom Qualcomm core with custom Motorola logic on top sounds intriguing and the prospect of new Motorola chips based on other SoCs even more so.